Initiative-less combat?

[SangoProduction]

For any group that is very rpg oriented and cooperative that might work beautifully. Any group that is not cooperative you will have problems with any system so no loss there.
How are you imagining several actions? Does every player get as many tokens as there are actions?

I cannot picture yet how you deal with enemy actions. If there is an ambush it should be clear that enemies act first. How do you deal with everything else? Will you also "just say" that an enemy will act now or will you have player turn vs. enemy turn?

Edit: sorry I misunderstood the 50/50 thing.
I am not sure how far that will work with an action economy. Take a group of 4 players. In normal 3.5 rules and mid-level characters you should have something like 8 actions per turn. If enemies can only take a turn with 50% chance after a player - what about a larger group of enemies? What about just one big one? Will he get 8 chances to act then?

I think we may have a misunderstanding on the turn tokens. They are basically just there to say that you can still take your turn this round.
As for ambushes, you would just have the enemies act as appropriate. "You hear 4 arrows whistle from the trees. What's your AC, David?"
I think the half-remembered reference to Dagger Heart's system is more confusing than anything. I'm going to replace it more explicitly with my version.

I run a superhero game this way basically, but there's the added wrinkle that 'actions' are extended courses of action and not just one-off things. So its less like 'what do you do right now' and more like 'what are you going to be doing, until its resolved?'. This is handled in sets of pairwise interactions (with some ability to intervene in someone else's interaction, but not if you yourself are embroiled in one).

Another very similar setup I used for a more D&D-like game was again that you could call out your actions, but 'Initiative' was a skill in the system that specifically was only used for the special action 'I try to do this before they do that', and it had to be something where the thing you're trying to do is aimed at interrupting or invalidating the thing they're trying to do. But you could wait until some of the consequences of not interrupting had been described if you want.

So like, lets say the DM declares 'the monster attacks this character'. Someone could say 'I teleport them out of the way before the attack lands' which would be an opposed Initiative check. But just 'I attack the monster first' doesn't get to be one - stuff like that would effectively be treated as non-blocking (so you and the monster could attack each-other and kill each-other with your damage, rather than it having to be A then B or B then A). However if for example the resolution of the monster's attack was something like 'the character dies', you could do an Initiative check post-hoc to take the blow in place of that character. It wasn't very formalized what things would qualify and what things wouldn't (and honestly the Initiative skill didn't get used all that much), but I sort of like this view of Initiative as being a special action specifically reserved for interrupting things, rather than the default assumption.

I like that. Yeah, you could maintain initiative as a stat, and save it as an interruption ability, say once per round. (On success you immediately start your turn. On fail, you start after their turn is finished.) I still have apprehensions about some interruption that just says "No, I just walk away from the attack." But I guess that's what AoO is for. But for spells, you'd then have both the initiative interrupts and the save as failure points.
But maybe... that's... fine? Since it necessitates going after the target, and still succeeding on initiative to get the effect.
If it's (perhaps perceived as) too good, then some might feel pigion holed into going last. Which can feel rather bad.

Getting rid of initiative rolls and instead using initiative modifier is an obvious answer, but not a good one — there needs to be a random element because acting first can be so decisive.

However, it might be random enough if only one side (PCs or NPCs) rolled, and the other side used 10 + modifier. PCs should use set scores if your concern is time, because coordinating multiple people is the time consuming part, and also because you can pre-roll NPC initiative scores before combat. This is what I'd do. It's a decent compromise because it keeps some randomness, but doesn't add any extra drag time in-combat compared to static scores as long as you preroll NPC initiative.

Frankly, you could also just have PCs pre-roll initiative at the end of a combat for whatever their next combat happens to be.


If you were OK with making initiative truly random you could distribute rather than frontload the burden of rolling initiative by randomly determining after each turn who will act next. Dex is a strong enough stat without also contributing to initiative. But having a modifier is probably important in a game like D&D.

I was thinking of actually getting rid of initiative entirely.